TIM wrote:Vietnam incense grade aloeswood. For burning, not good enough for drinking or brewing tea.

A mix of black, Iron, honey and white aloeswood.

thats pretty interesting for me my selection criteria is a little on the opposite, there are often more woods that are not good enough for heating, but excellent for brewing, drinking, or throwing onto a hot coal directly.

fortunately i'm no merchant.. if i were one i'll probably hide the real stuff and "present" the fake stuff as real.. kidding!!!!

but anyway, beads are often the most fun to authenticate and play with. the price margin in comparison to actual raw material is stunning! a 4-5 gram bracelet can easily cost a couple hundred dollars a gram.. (when the raw material is probably tens of dollars/gram for the good ones, and tens of cents for the crappy ones).. so there's a huge boat of people leaping into trading these paraphernalia..

i happen to know quite many ways to "make" agarwood beads.. so many that i scare myself sometimes.. but just to demonstrate one of the techniques i had developed (purely for research, non commercial purpose since i am not involved in trading/selling agarwood beads online/offline)

using "kyarazen agarwood solution 2" and a quick treatment using "kyarazen agarwood mechanism 4", i can turn a "worthless" malaysian unresinated agarwood bead into something that can bluff some experts using agarwood resin.. just a few minutes on request, i can vary the degree of "resination", style of resination, color, density as well...

Teaism wrote:Wow! 3.2kg!!!!! The market rate for kyara is $300-500 per gram. For bigger piece it is even higher. Smoke came out from my calculator when I try to calculate the value. Wow!!! Superb collection!

hahahaha! the price is beyond that now! $300-500/gram was the late era when we're most aggressively collecting

huge incense companies, such as b4ieid0 often only exhibited kyaras of 1kg, or less.. not to even talk about a 3.65kg piece, so if this 3.65kg auctioned piece is real, its a good deal, if not, the buyer's gonna be suckered real bad.. thats how people make money from unknowing/unsuspecting buyers with a tiny bit of seemingly authoritative knowledge.

in recent years traders approach me through my website asking me if i want to buy "kyara", not incredibly pricey.. purchased some samples and they were rubbish! but it seems that there are some middle eastern "oil" traders/resellers that had believed it was possible to get "kyara" at these prices and fell for it. and perhaps that is why they use such chinese and japanese terms to sell arabic perfume now

pretty sad to see that arabic perfume/oud cannot stand on its own right now and require the use of japanese and chinese input

Last edited by kyarazen on Jan 18th, '14, 02:14, edited 1 time in total.

there were some whom had procured some K3 from me, i made them promise me not to use K3 to forge kyara by coating/apply it on aloeswood.

if applied, a simple piece of low quality aloeswood will immediately smell like kyara, and since most people buy fragrant wood without a proper kodo or heating analysis/classification, its really easy to dupe others.

low quality agarwood conversion to high quality by artificial means is the best practice now.. you cant deny that the starting material is "real agarwood" and it has all the right marks and structures etc

but there's another type of wood really commonly used nowadays, it absorbs perfume oils, resins, and all that really well, so buyers are easily taken in. material C! under $1 per bracelet, unsuspecting buyers pay up to $2k per bracelet

Some samples turned out to have a bolder aroma, but it was unfocused. These were revealed to be plantation wood possibly infected with multiple strains. The wild Cambodia kyara stood out early in the testing. We followed familiar methods for judging the aroma and taste of the samples. Heating the samples would be quite wasteful, so we heated a tiny piece, and sated our curiosity by burning a Kyara themed stick from a top Japanese firm. I was not confident in the blend upon smelling it in the package, but once the smoke was swirling around, it was a delight. To shake things up we even tried a bit of old growth American oak harvested by our own MV. The scent of vanilla in the dry wood was intoxicating. Not bad in the cup either.

Some samples turned out to have a bolder aroma, but it was unfocused. These were revealed to be plantation wood possibly infected with multiple strains. The wild Cambodia kyara stood out early in the testing. We followed familiar methods for judging the aroma and taste of the samples. Heating the samples would be quite wasteful, so we heated a tiny piece, and sated our curiosity by burning a Kyara themed stick from a top Japanese firm. I was not confident in the blend upon smelling it in the package, but once the smoke was swirling around, it was a delight. To shake things up we even tried a bit of old growth American oak harvested by our own MV. The scent of vanilla in the dry wood was intoxicating. Not bad in the cup either.